SOURCE: "Medusa Points and Contact Points," in Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, The University Press of Kentucky, 1985, pp. 119-42.

In the following essay, Robertson analyzes how Tyler changes traditional ideas about family and its interaction with outsiders in her novels.

John Updike, a fan of Anne Tyler's work, remarked in a review that "Tyler, whose humane and populous novels have attracted (if my antennae are tuned right) less approval in the literary ether than the sparer offerings of Ann Beattie and Joan Didion, is sometimes charged with the basic literary sin of implausibility." Indeed, Tyler's novels do not seem a promising hunting ground for critics, who seek advances in the experimental surface of fiction. Her most palpable narrative virtues are by and large traditional ones: memorable characters, seductive plots, imaginative and hawk-eyed descriptions. Tyler is adept with the simile, acute as a psychologist, and quite good at...